Hydrogen Generator not producing enough power to run itself?

[commandantjones]

I'm trying to set up a Hydrogen Generator to produce power. I tried setups with 1, 2 and 3 Electrolytic Separators connected to it, fed by one and then two pumps. No matter what I do, it doesn't seem to produce an energy surplus. In other words, it's taking more power to run the separators and pump than the generator can produce, even at full power.

My basic testing setup was: a hydrogen generator feeding into an advanced battery box. The battery box was then wired to feed the Separator(s) and pump which fed into the generator. My hope was that the generator would produce enough power to run the separator and pump, and then some extra to keep the battery box at full charge so I could use the power for other things.

I inserted a full battery into the battery box to seed the system, and it started running down, and never produced a surplus. So then I turned off the hydrogen output on the separators, and fed power into the battery box until the separator(s) was full of both hydrogen and water, then turned hydrogen output back on, to start the generator. Even running with full hydrogen, at the supposed 20KW output, the battery box was still draining, not gaining. In addition to that, 3 Separators doesn't even produce enough hydrogen to keep the generator running. So not only is it burning more power than it produces, you can't produce enough hydrogen to keep the generator running anyway.

Am I doing something wrong here, or is this generator basically useless unless you feed it manually or with a complicated rail system feeding water into the separators? Shouldn't it be able to produce enough power to at least feed itself, let alone any machines that need power??

A pic of my 3 Separator testing setup:

[ToxicWaste]

Not a english specker, so plz bare with my mistype

i got energy out put with 1 pump 1 separator & 1 Hydro Gen

i jump start the sytem with a battery box and removed it once it get started

than linking the Hydro Gen output right back to the pump and separator also into the advan Battery box

Dont know how to upload pic here, if u want i could sent it through Email

Closer look to ur Pic, what pipe are u using ? it should be using with water pipe

[William Eliot]

I believe this may be intended. In real life, (assuming that hydrogen must be first be separated from water by electrolysis) the energy used to seperate hydrogen is the theoretical maximum that you will ever be able to produce. This is ignoring the fact that much of the energy is lost in seperating hydrogen, so the process is far from that ideal. I cannot speak to whether this was intended, though I would bet it was, but it is realistic.

[commandantjones]

I got mine working, though it doesn't produce much net power for such a complex system. I split the power output from the generator into two directions, each one stepped down to 120 volts with transformers. One side feeds the separator and the pump, the other into an energy cube (I found that the battery boxes bleed/decay a small amount of power, so they constantly feed from the generators)

This setup keeps the generator running, albeit slowly, since it appears impossible to actually generate enough hydrogen to keep the generator running in real time.

I think there's just a huge bug in the way power feeds and splits on demand from machines. If anything is pulling power from a single line, it pulls it all, or something like that. I had the same problem with a fusion reactor, which should put out huge amounts of energy, but unless I manually split the output into multiple storage units, and then only used one or two to feed the fusion reactor, it would suck more power than it generated, too. But if I store part of it in a separate storage unit(s), it will keep going and produce net power.